#boxes writing

            Just a little longer.

            Just a little bit longer and this would all be over.

            So you kept telling yourself. Just a few more classes, a few more hours, a few more sleepless nights, wasted weekends, eons of seconds spent turning page after page, swelling knuckles with graphite, bleeding your eyes from the computer screen’s myriad of infinitesimal clicks.

            And there it was. The degree, the baseless celebration, the promise of a future of prosperity if you would just keep pedaling – keep lifting your head, the golden prodigy, and not disappoint.

            A beautiful decoration for your wall. The pain didn’t stop coming. Your fingers wept, like mourning mistresses, over your computer keys – day after day after night. And it seemed as though none of your endeavors were getting you anywhere – that none of your attempts, your passions, your persuasions were bringing fruit. You were fruitless, you were dull. Your life was leaving you in grades and in notebooks and in click clicking computer mice.

            It wasn’t enough. You were slipping, you were running out of time. Your future was at stake – you couldn’t afford to work anymore, there wasn’t the time or the money or the energy to maintain your grades.

            What are you doing they told you, in hushed but angry whispers. You are our golden child, you cannot disappoint us. What are you doing?

            Desperate now, slave to the flashing screens and updating gradebooks and turning pages, you sought for an escape. Scoured for a way out, for an opportunity. Wept red and blue at your screen, graphite bruised fingers wet from your reddened eyes.

            This isn’t going to end, you needed a way out.

            And then it came. A promise, a lie, a beautiful ray of hope to lift you from your despair. The perfect job, the perfect postdoc. A job that your ruined courses didn't deserve, with enough pay to cover your cost of living.

            And experience – beautiful, necessary experience with the world’s leading company in biochemical research. You were the most fortunate creature in existence, turning your disastrous fortitude into good fortune. The opportunity of a lifetime for an ambitious golden child.

            Your eyes sweep computer screens once again, entering data, watching over experiments, fingers shuddering with the memory of failed tests, of ruined blood and agonizing mistakes.

            One agonizing mistake, the memories of which roam these halls even now, prisoners of your blind ambition.

            You were a bright-eyed, ambitious student once. And now your eyes are dull, restless. Anxious with memories and responsibilities, weighed down by guilt and stress.

            The ward’s golden child, who turned a blind eye to injustice for the sake of desperation.

            You ask yourself now as you do every day, the cameras weeping pain and agonies before your eyes, the creature within your flesh stirring like a second heart with the knowledge of what you have done – what you have helped create, with your excitement and your dedication and your unyielding support of this facility.

            The same question whispered from the back of your mind, in sleep and in dreams and in the staircases that you walk, soundless but raw with pain:

You aren’t doing this right.

The words are few, but they have the desired effect, delivered with blunt, biting force.

I can feel it sharpen around me, like a frightened rat backed into a corner. Justine, I believe the creature was called. A human, a fool in a white laboratory and an even whiter lab coat.

“Be quiet,” The human hisses back, struggling to sound strong. “I’m giving it a partial dose, it isn’t going to die like the last one.”

You can pretend all that you want, little human, but I can feel your thoughts shaking and trembling like the bough of a tree in a winter storm.

The creature – Justine – anxiously considers the lab rats on the table. The first of which lies dead, its black and white fur crusted with blue liquid from my host’s unsuccessful endeavors.

It will, I say. This rat will die, and all of the other test subjects will die. This ignorant human will never be able to create a serum to pry our consciousnesseses apart, not after fusing us so naively. But how many bodies must this creature take before it will learn its lesson?

“I made a mistake.” Justine’s thoughts tremble, as though holding back tears. “It isn’t going to happen again.”

Her weakness infuriates me. It curls around my consciousness and suddenly I want to hurt her once more with my words.

All that you ever do, I say, is make mistakes.

Her shuddering, pitiful response does little to still my fury. It is endless, I am permanently disgruntled and permanently upended, like the string of a blanket that has been caught and is now eternally unwinding.

As I unwind her.

Revenge is a human concept to me. I am not doing this to seek vengeance – although it is satisfying to make the creature whimper and groan, tormented by guilt and her endless anxieties.

No, I do not seek revenge. I merely seek that which all living things do – to continue existing. I seek the life that I have seen Justine remove from countless innocent test subjects, in her attempts to remove mine.

She intends to separate us, and this I cannot have.

The human is unsettled, taking a deep breath to steady herself, heart beating erratically against the cage of her chest.

It isn’t difficult to keep her from succeeding. Humans are so easy to control – a few whispered words, a few blunt reminders, and her thoughts are scattered. They fill with her own anxious whispers, desperate mutterings about the hallways and about coldness. I linger in her thoughts for a few more moments, allowing her the chance to calm down.

Before I will shatter her once more.

“I understand why you don’t want to be in here,” She tells me, almost desperately. Still trying to form a connection with me, still viewing herself as the victim. When it is only by her hand that my life has been ceded.

You don’t want to be in here either, I reply, coldly. Thoughts do not lie, and I can read hers as clearly as a predator appraises the tracks of its next meal.

“Of course I don’t want to be here. I’d rather be outside,” She murmurs, with a longing glance at the empty white walls, as though picturing a window to the outside world.

“I think that all of us would rather be outside.”

I say nothing.

I have never seen outside as she has – free, green, teetering with life and with beauty. I have only ever seen the inside of these white, empty rooms, where footsteps echo like gunshots, and where a chilling cold cuts deep into our bones.

My host’s and mine, for this useless flesh has become my own.

I watch through her eyes as the human picks up the syringe, her breath shaking with terror and desperation. The blue serum within glitters, bubbling from the tip of the needle and down the length of our arm.

And I can only watch as she injects the little white-furred body, as helpless and trapped as I am, beneath this human’s control.

It jolts, withers, and dies, just as its kin had – lying in the tray beside it, two blue-encrusted corpses.

I twitch and beat against the walls of her consciousness, but there is no escape. Escape will only come as it did for this latest test subject. In unmoving, blue-encrusted silence.

All that I can do is prevent her from ever succeeding in seeing me to the same fate. And that means that the correct dosage must never be found.

I told you that it wouldn’t work, I whisper, coldly, haltingly. Nothing that you try is ever going to work.

The human’s eyes are fixed onto the syringe, her thoughts continuing to race with desperation. And in their frantic, disorganized chaos, I can feel my hold over her consciousness strengthening.

“It’s so cold in here. . .” Justine whispers, struggling to ignore the claws of my disapproval. I use it to cut deep, deep into her psyche, to carve out a new home for myself, amidst the tangles of her mind.